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24 November, 2010

Tekumel 3

Though the tables and machinery pull at your curiosity, you decide your first best course is in arming yourself. Easing around the corner toward the stand of rubbish, you see into the next room. Parts of you immediately label your shadowy view as both the laboratory of a sorcerer and of a scientist. A multitude of oddities pull your eye about. The source of the buzzing is in this room, but this too must wait.

Remembering your task, you reach the corner and begin looking through the dusty items for something useful in defending yourself. You find a long metal rod, nearly as tall as yourself. It has knurled hand-size grips at shoulder width. Collars of metal flare out slightly about a foot from each end. It's solid and heavy, and for many of you this is the first time in memory when you've held a metal object. Grasping it reassuringly in both hands, you return to the body-bearing tables.

Approaching the one nearest where you woke, you search for some sort of control. A button, a lever, some moving part, but the table itself seems free of such things. The spidery machinery above yields somewhat to your touch, the whole apparatus readjusting slightly as you move one arm. You wait expectantly, looking at the cloth covered body, but nothing happens.

Returning to the metal table in which you first beheld your image, you begin gingerly fingering the gems and stones affixed to its surface. You now see them as buttons, knobs and indicators. The spidery mass which you moved moments ago begins to hum with energy above the table next to your own. A weird and otherworldly glow takes hold of the shadows above the table, seeming to fight with the air itself. It builds to a crescendo, and suddenly stops as the space above the body emanates the sound of a single deep thud, as of a mass falling on the floor, or a single great knock.